parated him from them, were so tangible and yet so illusive. In every
outward respect they were his fellow beings; they spoke the same
language, wore the same dress, ate the same food, and yet
unquestionably they were creatures of different fibre. He felt
curiously daunted and curiously attracted by the peculiar fact.

To appreciate the difference between the Englishman and the Irishman
one must see the latter in his native atmosphere. It is there that his
faults and his virtues take on their proper values; there that his
innate poetry, his reckless generosity, his prodigal hospitality have
fullest scope; there that his primitive narrowness of outlook, his
antiquated sense of honour and his absurdly sensitive self-esteem are
most vividly backgrounded. Outside his own country, he is merely a
subject of a great Empire, possessing, perhaps, a sharper wit and a
more ingratiating manner than his fellow-subjects of colder
temperament; but in his natural environment he stands out pre-eminently
as a peculiar development--the product of a warm-blooded, intelligent,
imaginative race that by some oversight of Nature has been pushed aside
in the march of the nations.

Milbanke made no attempt to formulate this idea or any portion of it,
as he paced steadily forward across the darkening sands; but
incontinently it did flash across his mind that the girl beside him
claimed more attention in this unsophisticated atmosphere than he might
have given her in conventional surroundings. She was so much part of
the picture--so undeniably a child of the sweeping cliffs, the
magnificent sea, and the hundred traditions that encircled the
primitive land. In her buoyant, youthful figure he seemed, by a curious
retrograde process of the mind, to find the solution to his own early
worship of Asshlin. Asshlin had attracted him, ruled him, domineered
over him by right of superiority--the hereditary, half-barbaric
superiority of the natural aristocrat; the man of ancient lineage in a
country where yesterday--and the glories of yesterday--stand for
everything, where to-day is unreckoned with, and to-morrow does not
exist. Reaching the end of the strand, he turned to her quickly with a
strange sensation of sympathy--almost of apprehension.

"Miss Clodagh," he said gently, as she began to ascend the heaped-up
boulders that separated the road from the beach, "Miss Clodagh, I grant
that I don't quite understand, as you put it; but I knew your father
man